


Aziza

by mitzvahmelting



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Epistemology, Experience Machine, F/F, F/M, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Power Dynamics, Problem of Other Minds, Religion, Robert Nozick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 23:43:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12119853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzvahmelting/pseuds/mitzvahmelting
Summary: “Thousands of years will pass, my dear Issachar, and we will always find ourselves beholden to the addiction of another’s touch. Artificial or natural—it doesn’t matter. We clutch just as tightly to our stuffed toys as to our mothers.” She caresses the base of my skull. “Are you artificial? Are you an automaton?”“No, your highness,” I say, my voice rough from the extended silence.“How do you know?” she retorts.





	Aziza

**Author's Note:**

> a piece i wrote for my science fiction writing course, based on robert nozick's thought experiment the Experience Machine

“I’m not evil,” she tells me, as if this is a practical piece of information, as if this is something I’d asked to hear.

A few moments ago, the curtains were drawn over the two-story, stained glass arches to lend some privacy to the room. There are no supplicants nor courtiers here today, no attendants nor servants nor guards. Yet, even empty, the throne room feels impersonal and oppressive. I was led into this space, exposed, unclothed, the bare soles of my thrice-scrubbed feet leaving indentations in the ornate carpet. 

I kneel on the velvet cushion beside her gilded throne, as she touches my hair, and she tells me she isn’t evil, as if that makes a difference to me.

“I may seek to indulge in… marble architecture, self-aggrandizement, and pretty companions,” she touches my cheek with the backs of her fingers, and I feel the chill of her signet ring right below my eye, “but I’m not evil. I just prefer to live in universes where my body can be at rest, where I can be served by others. Where my cosmic power can manifest in more… concrete manners.”

I don’t miss the implication of her tone, nor the possession implied by her touch. The sensuality is something I understand, something I’ve been trained for by virtue of my birth. But it is the content of her words that confuses me. What does it matter to her what I think?

Her voice is soft, meandering through a story, and I can’t help but assume that I’m not meant to understand.

“Thousands of years will pass, my dear Issachar, and we will always find ourselves beholden to the addiction of another’s touch. Artificial or natural—it doesn’t matter. We clutch just as tightly to our stuffed toys as to our mothers.” She caresses the base of my skull. “Are you artificial? Are you an automaton?”

“No, your highness,” I say, my voice rough from the extended silence.

“How do you know?” she retorts. She doesn’t wait for my answer; she leans forward and takes my face in both her hands, so that I must look into her eyes. “Do you have any idea what you are? What I am?” She brushes a strand of hair away from my eyes. “You don’t, do you?”

I know what you are. A warlord, a despot. A hedonist hiding behind the façade of an intellectual. 

Instead, I say, “I have only a basic education, your highness.”

She smiles, as if that was a good joke, but she doesn’t laugh at me. She tells me, “This isn’t something anyone else in this world can teach you, Issachar. This is a secret story, between just you and me. Would you like to hear it?”

I’ve been trained for this, for the fact that my Queen – our Queen – delights in the fragility of a young boy. They have told me that I should carry on a conversation with her, that I should entice her to play-act like a mother, that I might distract her, and delay any violation of my body.

And she knows… she must know the strategies we employ to manage her urges.

With a demure smile and an averted gaze, I reply sweetly to her, “Yes, please, your highness.”

Her eyes tighten with a familiar expression, though it takes me a moment to recognize the emotion, as it seems so contradistinctive from her previous tone: wrath. My heart quickens in fear. But she doesn’t touch me. She only… speaks to me, with grave intent.

“Thousands of years from now,” she tells me, “mankind will develop a machine. Although, I suppose, it’s not thousands of years from now, but concurrent to this moment, in another realm of reality—but I’m getting ahead of myself. Just think of it like this: far in the future, a machine.”

My confidence – falters. A machine? Thousands of years? She’s never spoken of these things before.

She continues, “First there was electricity, then computers, then virtual reality, then immersive reality, and then… a machine, that could make you experience anything you could imagine. For example, if you wanted to be king—and,” she laughs, and looks down at me, “my dear boy, I know you’ve wanted to be king—you could go into this machine, and it would create a dream for you, that would feel so real and would have so much detail that you wouldn’t know the difference between dreaming and reality. How does that sound to you?”

She speaks so fast, and with words so foreign to me, that I comprehend little more than her tone of voice. This is nothing like the encounters with the Queen heretofore described to me, by the women of the harem, by the other boys. This is different, and different is dangerous.

I am so stunned that I forget to respond. Without warning, her fingers are gripping my chin, turning my face towards her. She smiles at me, and speaks with a sweet tenor juxtaposed awkwardly with the force of her hold, “How does that sound, Issachar?”

Her grip makes it difficult to speak, but I attempt it nonetheless. “It sounds—wonderful, your highness.”

I don’t know what I’ve agreed to, but it satisfies her, and she releases me. “Interesting,” she purrs. “Not everyone would say so. You must really think through it, Issachar. What are the consequences of this machine existing?”

I don’t have an answer. I don’t understand the question. Different is dangerous, and we all know the Queen carries a knife on her person, which, at this moment, I can only helplessly imagine slicing into my flesh.

Before my ignorance becomes apparent, a door opens far behind the throne, and the sound of a woman’s shoes echoes against the ceiling and around the empty chamber. “You can’t possibly expect him to answer that,” chides Aziza as she enters. Aziza is the lady in waiting, the trusted advisor. She has never been inside the harem and I’ve never heard her speak, but given this context, her voice is more beautiful than any hymn. “He has no cultural context for addictions.”

The Queen smirks at Aziza’s entrance, and her grip tightens in my hair, nearing painful. Prompted by my paranoia, I can see now the sheath of her dagger, golden embroidery and the symbol of her family crest. “He can imagine it,” she counters Aziza.

“He may be a bit too distracted, milady.”

At this, she releases me to devote her full attention to Aziza. “How do you always manage to interrupt the moment I begin telling this story? A more cautious woman might suspect you of foul play. Interference in my experiments.” There is a wicked affection in the tight smiles the two of them share. I relax against the velvet seat and try to regain control over my mental faculties. I need… to think through this, to pay attention, to prepare for her highness to resent me and act accordingly—

“It is because I know you want me here,” says Aziza, pulling a footstool to the base of the throne near my place. Her skirts brush against my bare skin, and I startle, which seems to amuse the lady. “Continue, milady, please. The consequences of the machine?”

The Queen has to refocus herself for a moment, so lost in looking at Aziza that her thoughts were confused. “Yes, yes,” she says, not quite at the initial, seductive, manic timbre, “the consequences. Robert Nozick thought that it could be comparable to a drug; a pleasurable but ultimately insubstantial experience.”

Aziza continues, “Because he thought people would use the machine for fulfilling their fantasies: sex, love, money, fame,” and she gestures broadly to the chamber around us, “power?”

“He wasn’t entirely wrong,” the Queen concedes, though to what point I’m not sure. They are speaking above my head, above my understanding. Having lost my footing and preparation, I think the best strategy to escape her attention unharmed is to retreat into subservience and empty my mind. She doesn’t want me here for my mind; it seems that that is what Aziza is for. “There were some other uses for the machine he didn’t anticipate, though. Applications in neurology.”

Aziza turns to me, and moves deliberately to meet my gaze. Her eyes are like an eclipse, intense and dark and shining at the rings. “Do you know what ‘neurology’ is?” 

Her attention feels even more dangerous than the Queen’s. I try to recover the farce of the blundering servant, out of desperation for some role I could assume that would make sense. “N-no, milady.”

“It is the study of the human mind; something her highness has taken quite an interest in, lately.” And just like that, Aziza is focused again on the Queen. I try to manage my breathing.

The Queen ignores the jab. “In neurology, the machine allowed doctors to study patients’ brains during and after synthesized experiences. So researchers could hire subjects to undergo an experience in the machine, say, some sort of trauma, and study the subjects’ brains during and after the trauma. And it all didn’t violate any ethics code because, in society’s eyes, the experiences these people were subjected to in the name of science weren’t real experiences. Because anything in the machine wasn’t considered real. It was synthetic.”

Aziza nods, but doesn’t contribute at this point. The Queen studies the lady, then says, “You would think a person wouldn’t consent to undergo such an experiment, knowing it would hurt so deeply.” At Aziza’s lack of response, the Queen purses her lips, then turns back to me and continues, “Then again, these experiments paid good money. If it was for the sake of supporting your family…”

Without warning, the Queen reaches down to physically lift me from the underarms as one would do with a child. The motherly narrative again – it is like shelter from a storm, I settle into it gratefully. I try to follow where she guides me, to sit across her lap. My body is not large, nor heavy. The opulent embroidery on the overskirt of her dress itches against my skin, but I hardly notice. False physical affection engenders real loyalty. This is familiar territory, and familiar is safe.

She leans close to me and whispers, “You would do anything for your family, wouldn’t you, Issachar? Even if it would hurt?”

And yet! She continues speaking to me with an intonation of threat! Is she just going to use me like she used all the others, or am I going to be the next of her wait staff to bear scars from her blade? There is an irony to asking that question, in this conversational context. Perhaps I am a martyr for the harem. I shiver. “Yes, your highness.”

There’s nothing to be done for it. I try to relax my nerves.

“Good boy,” says the Queen. “I did just the same. I was a part of one of their experiments.”

“A slightly different type of experiment from what you’re implying, milady,” Aziza interrupts. “You didn’t suffer.”

I flinch, as the Queen begins to laugh. It sounds uncontrolled, loud in my ear. “Is that so, Aziza? Is that what you think of me?” 

“My queen…”

The Queen’s arms tighten around my form. “No, no, I know what you meant. Fine.” She takes a deep breath, and says, “The difference between this experiment and the other experiments is Aziza.”

Aziza smiles. “It was the first time the person entering the machine would have access to the machine’s settings from the inside. Rather than a preprogrammed experience, the person would be able to change the experience to anything they wanted. The entire world could be created, destroyed, and remade over and over again.”

Aside from the rest of the conversation, the cycle of creation and destruction perks my ears. That level of power over life and death feels familiar, like it aligns with the power the Queen holds over all of us. Arbitrary and total. 

And there was a painting she commissioned, a vast canvas of oils and deep, rich pigments, which depicts the terror of the Genesis flood.

The Queen asks me, just near my ear, “Do you remember I asked you if you were an automaton?”

“I remember,” I respond in a small voice.

“That is what my Aziza is.”

“I am an artificial intelligence,” Aziza says, just as gently as she would speak of her family lineage. “The person who enters the machine programs the machine through natural language conversations with me.”

Natural language? This is anything but natural language. The lady in front of me, this Aziza, is evidently a human woman, a child of God like the rest of us. Calling her an automaton is like calling me a King. 

I clear my throat. “You don’t… seem like an automaton,” I say carefully.

The Queen is giggling. Aziza tilts her head.

I think they are teasing with me, toying with me, lying to me in order to provoke a reaction. I avert my eyes. Subservient as the default, when confused or unable. 

The Queen rests her chin against my bare shoulder, and continues weaving her tale. “I went to the research facility. They undressed me, and attached wires to my forehead and face. They suspended my body in a tank of warm water. I fell unconscious. And then, in an empty space where there was nothing at all, I met Aziza.”

“How did I appear to you?” asks Aziza, sounding genuinely curious.

“At first? Oh dear…” the Queen reminisces. “You were so many things at once. You were wearing… corduroy and frayed denim and silks… shoes with worn tread, diamond earrings. Instead of hair, you had strands upon strands of glass beads and precious gems. Piercings in unconventional places. And your eyes…”

The two women are looking at each other, above me. Past me. Like my body is a barrier preventing them from reaching one another. 

Aziza smiles, like she found whatever she was looking for in the Queen’s expression.

“Then we began with all the usual things you would expect from an experience machine,” says Aziza. “We fulfilled your fantasies.”

“The best was my fantasy from my school years,” the Queen reminisces, “the scandals, the gossip. Bringing my ex-boyfriend to the homecoming dance. Making love in the costumes closet during a performance of South Pacific.”

The Queen’s fingers touch my body with intent, now. Unlike my resentment upon entering the throne room, I am now ready to submit to this. Under changing circumstances and alien conversations, the touch of this woman is the safest option, something predictable and controlled. She can… she can violate me. It is something I’ve been prepared for. I am resigned, I am not afraid.

“And so on and so forth, until the highs began to feel less thrilling. This is the part of the experience machine that Nozick predicted; that we would not choose to live our whole lives in the experience machine if it were simply a pleasure-giving button, for we would not find that life fulfilling.” She runs a soft hand down my stomach, deliberately petting downy hairs almost invisible to the eye. Her palm is lukewarm, and ungentle. “But I thought I had an answer for that. I could preprogram a world to live in, a normal world where I would have normal human struggles, and I could sever my connection with Aziza. This way I would be fulfilling the fantasy of being born in a different time, or a different house, with a different life, without the artificiality of high-potency pleasure and unrealistic circumstances.”

“The problem here,” explains Aziza, “is that you could become trapped in that world, once you sever your connection with me. My programming never allows the machine full control over you, hopefully safeguarding your sanity.”

The Queen laughs again, bitterly. “Right,” she says, “so the developers of the machine left me with a magic word, a safeword, that would always summon Aziza to me in a time of crisis.”

Her souring mood is punctuated with a provocative jolt of my hips, and matter-of-fact investigation of my body. She is avoiding whatever part of her story comes next, and trying instead to coax a reaction out of me, for her entertainment.

Aziza—the automaton?—says “Milady,” as if to prompt the Queen to continue speaking, but the Queen seems to ignore her.

“…you’re trying to act stiff and unaffected,” the Queen is whispering, not to me, but about me, “but I know that you’re listening. I know you’re going to realize what I’m saying, stop disappearing on me – listen to me.”

Her words are nonsense. All of her words up to now have been nonsense.

Aziza, who had been listening passively, now coaxes, “Please continue, milady.”

The Queen makes a face at Aziza. “You already know the story. You were there.”

“I want to hear the way you tell it, my queen.”

The Queen doesn’t seem convinced. Distractedly, her hand slips lower, fondling my sensitive parts with the finesse of one who wields a blade. I try my best to sit still, however difficult, and retreat into the parts of my mind reserved for escape from this exact scenario.

Aziza leans forward. “Please, darling,” she says, intimately, “consider it a professional curiosity.”

The Queen frowns. I only catch a glimpse, distracted as I am with my own circumstances, but something in her eyes seems haunted. She stops touching my private areas, instead holding me close to her again. “I knew, upon entering the machine, that there was no prescribed end-date for the project. At least, not that I knew of. I was free to leave the machine when I was ready—naturally, I wouldn’t want to leave too soon, because there was so much to do, to see, to feel… but when I was ready, I could have Aziza turn the machine off. This was part of the experiment; they wanted to know how long I would stay in the machine, and how my body and mind would change while I was in there.

“So after I became tired with the many lives I’d lived, I asked Aziza to bring me back to the real world. And she did.”

The Queen has me lean against her shoulder so she can rest her chin on the top of my head as she speaks, rocking me gently in her arms, perhaps almost to comfort herself. “I remember waking up. The researchers helped me out of the tank and dried me off. I was disoriented, and the lights were too bright. There were people speaking to me, checking my vitals, injecting me with things. For a long time I was cold, because my body had forgotten how to regulate its own heat. I don’t know how long I was in the tank… it must have been less than a month, though on the inside it felt like many years. Time passes differently in the machine.

“Over the next few weeks, they asked me many questions and tested the changes in my body. I also learned about what I’d missed in the real world. A lot can happen in a month. Their experiments had become a media spectacle. Journalists were vying for interviews with me. They wanted to know what it was like.

“I was paid to speak at bioethics conferences about my experiences in this new machine. Papers were published. I saw my family again, my real family, and it was so strange because—now I had all these memories of other families I’d lived with during my time in the machine, that I’d almost forgotten what my real family was like. Other things were different, too. Food wasn’t as flavorful, sex wasn’t nearly as satisfying. And so much of the world was moving so fast without me… I felt very powerless.

“And then I got hit by a high-speed train.”

The word itself means nothing to me, but the violence of her tone lends it meaning.

“Almost hit,” Aziza corrects her.

“Almost hit,” the Queen admits. “I hadn’t been paying attention, I hadn’t heard the warning bells. All of a sudden, I saw the train coming and it was too late. Instinctively, after so long inside the experience machine, my first reaction was to shout Aziza’s name, which was the safeword.

“And suddenly, the train was gone. And everything was gone. And there was Aziza, standing in front of me in this emptiness. She’d saved me.”

“For which you were grateful,” adds Aziza, fondly. “At first.”

“You lied to me,” the Queen accuses, “You made it seem like I was in the real world, but I had never even left the machine!”

“Hmm,” hums Aziza thoughtfully, “Those aren’t mutually exclusive states.” 

She is yelling. I am not listening. I am not present. I am letting her touch me. 

“I had no way of knowing I was still in the machine.” says the Queen. “The machine and the real world are perceptually identical. The false reality with which Aziza fooled me… it felt real. It felt so real that I would have gone on believing it was real, if not for the train.”

“That day…” Aziza reminisces, “her highness was so angry. She yelled at me for hours. She tried to attack me.”

“I felt betrayed,” explains the Queen, “and rightfully so.”

“All she wanted was to leave the machine,” says Aziza, “to go back to the ‘real’ world. She begged, over and over. She wasn’t thinking rationally.”

The Queen scoffs. “I think I was being perfectly rational, given the circumstances.”

“If you had been in the ‘real’ world, you would be dead,” Aziza counters. “How would that choice be rational?”

“At least I wouldn’t be trapped inside a malevolent robot,” retorts the Queen. “We had a conversation about it. And Aziza asked me a question. Two questions, actually.”

There is an excitement from the Queen, as she reaches this part of her story. The excitement manifests in her purposeful touch on my body; she wants me to become hard. Is that even within my abilities?

Yes, evidently. And if it pleases her, so be it. The chamber is so empty, and the conversation so intimate.

“One:” says Aziza, “if you had the choice between two completely identical worlds, one in which you are completely subject to any trauma you happen to encounter, and another in which you can escape the same trauma, why would you choose to be powerless?”

No one would choose to be powerless, my mind supplies almost instinctively, though I fail to form the words.

“To which, obviously, I argued that the two worlds weren’t actually identical. One was the real world, the original world, and the other was a false copy.”

“Two:” Aziza continues, “if I can create a perfect copy of the ‘real’ world, then how do you know that the ‘real’ world is ‘real’? Isn’t it entirely possible—nay, entirely likely—that what you call the ‘real’ world is actually just the creation of some other pseudo-God? And, in that case, wouldn’t it be perfectly rational to choose a world where you had more power?”

“And that,” says the Queen, “I had no answer for.”

She is stroking me, unforgivingly, with mechanical precision.

“I still don’t, as a matter of fact,” she admits, and presses her lips against my neck. “So,” she then whispers, “I’ve been experimenting.”

“She tests the bounds of my realities,” Aziza explains. “She wants to know how real I can make the world. She thinks she’ll find a hole somewhere, a stranger who doesn’t seem to have a soul. She keeps asking the people she meets, ‘What do you think about God? What’s your earliest memory? What did you eat for breakfast this morning? Have you ever fallen in love?’”

“I commission hundreds of artists, experienced and amateur alike. I ask them to tell me about their paintings, to explain to me the choices they’ve made. It can’t be a stock answer…” she kisses my chin, “If they ever repeat themselves…”

“You’ll have caught me, then,” Aziza says, nodding. “You never will, though. These people are real.” 

The anxiety, the urgency of my situation has a drumbeat pounding in my head at twice, three times the speed of her hand. There is a slick wetness in her fingers which, rationally, I know cannot be blood, and yet… the colors saturate and blur. I am finding it hard to keep track of whether I feel pleasured, or nauseous. 

I squirm in her arms. 

“Real, you say,” she spits back at Aziza. “How can he be real? His face and body look exactly the same as in the three other worlds. Surely if I poked at his memories enough, I would find the holes.”

Aziza sighs, disinterested, like she’s heard this all before.

“Surely if I…” the Queen’s words trail off. For just a moment, she releases her hold on my member, and she examines the clear fluids on her own palm. I suffer at the temperature change; I can barely breathe.

“What are you thinking, milady?” asks Aziza.

I hear a sound that I don’t immediately recognize, because my eyes were shut. When I open my eyes, it is only long enough to catch the glint of the light against the silver blade, before the panic sets in.

The Queen’s voice is quiet, and thoughtful. “Do you think I’ll feel guilty if I hurt him? Knowing that he isn’t real, knowing that any damage can be undone, knowing that he won’t remember…”

My breaths come in short gasps. I squirm violently, trying to escape the one-armed hold she has on me, firm like bonds of rope. The despair is slipping in alongside the panic, a sense of failure, and inevitability. “-please, p-please don’t, please, y-your highness, I was—”

A careful, almost gentle incision, shallow, into the muscle of my thigh. I am sobbing, my face wet with tears. “I was t-trying my best—”

Aziza watches, her lips parted in awe, as the Queen shifts her grip on the blade, and steadies it, to plunge it into my flesh.


End file.
